Technology
A sleeve that works like a touchscreen
Researchers weave display and touch sensing into fibres, with everyday use still to be proven.
THE JOURNAL
Technology & Engineering
Look inside the inventions and infrastructure that move information, energy and ideas.
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LEARNING LAB · INTERACTIVE
The Periodic Landscape
Explore all 118 elements, rotate a 3D atom, look inside its nucleus and discover protons, neutrons and quarks. Start with the familiar table, then look closer one level at a time.
Explore the periodic tableFree to explore. Includes guided discoveries, comparison and a 2D alternative.
11 stories
Technology
How a hard drive writes and reads invisible magnetic bits
A hard drive turns current into a tiny magnetic pattern, preserves that pattern without power, then converts it back into an electrical signal as the disk spins.
Technology
How a photocopier copies with light and static charge
A copier does not press ink against the original. It turns reflected light into a temporary electrical pattern, gives that pattern to toner, and then moves the toner onto a new sheet.
Technology
How a quartz watch turns vibrations into seconds
A tiny crystal keeps a fast rhythm. Electronics count it down to a pace we can read, while a battery quietly supplies the energy.
Technology
How e-ink keeps a page without power
An e-reader moves tiny pigment particles to change its page. Keeping that arrangement visible is a different job, and that difference explains both its efficiency and its compromises.
Technology
How headphones make quiet by adding sound
Noise cancellation does not remove sound from the room. It adds a carefully timed counter-pressure near your ear, with performance that depends on the sound and the headphone design.
Engineering
Why the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisted itself apart
The famous film looks like a story about wind pushing a bridge. The deeper lesson is stranger: motion changed the air, and the air fed energy back into the motion.
Technology
How barcodes turn stripes into error-checked numbers
A supermarket scanner joins optics, arithmetic and a shared naming system. Its smallest safeguard is one extra digit, and that digit has revealing limits.
Technology
How undersea cables carry the internet
A message crosses the world in a moment. Its journey began with a ship, a copper wire, and an ocean of uncertainty.
Deeper reading
How does light stay inside a glass fibre?
A closer look at the boundary that turns a strand of glass into a path for information.
Deeper reading
Why faster broadband does not remove every delay
More information per second and a shorter wait are two different improvements.